Claudian Goldin is an economics historian who just won a Nobel. Tyler Cowen had a conversation with her back in 2021. I’ve picked out a few bits that particularly interested me, but there’s much more to the conversation.
Tenure
Following a long and interesting general discussion of the pay gap between men and women they focused on the position of female academics in economics. And that led to some remarks on tenure.
COWEN: How is the gender ratio for tenured economics professors evolving?
GOLDIN: CSWEP, that is, the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, puts together those data, and they are creeping upward, as one would think they would. Now, in some very interesting work, we can see that they are — I said the words “creeping up.” They’re not bounding up.
The reason that they’re not bounding up at first we thought was a pipeline issue, but now it’s pretty clear that it’s less the pipeline issue. While it was there and still is there, there’s also an issue with the fact that women — more than men — will leave academia and use their economic skills extremely well but outside the tenure track.
COWEN: Should we either abolish tenure or fundamentally change it so as not to penalize women, but also for other reasons? It seems grossly unfair.
GOLDIN: Yes, I certainly wouldn’t do it because it’s a penalty for one group or another. It is an issue that arose. It solved potentially an issue from some time ago. I don’t know if the fundamentals are the same that would support it. It is clearly a difficult problem in the sense that individuals have higher productivity when they’re young and then lower productivity. I think that having long-term contracts is useful for individuals in fields where they’re so good.
If we think about sports, clearly those people just clean up at the beginning, and then they become used-car salesmen or whatever they become. So the question is, do we have a completely changed academic environment in which the superstars clean up at some point and then they go into something else? I don’t think that that would work either.
I think that a very important thing to think about is that we produce a large number of products. We produce knowledge, and that’s really the hardest thing to figure out how to do, but we produce the dissemination of knowledge and teaching. And people who are older probably do that better, and that is not generally what tenure is given for.
Happiness
That led immediately to these remarks on happiness:
COWEN: I’m sure you know the [Betsey] Stevenson and [Justin] Wolfers paper, 2009. Why haven’t American women gained more in happiness?
GOLDIN: [laughs] See, I’m not a great fan of that. I remember Betsey was interviewed on Mother’s Day one year. She was a new mother. The person interviewing her said, “Your work shows that mothers are less happy than they had been before they became mothers.” The person said, “That was a great question for Mother’s Day.” Betsey was stuck, and she said, “Well, yes, but they would never give up their baby.” I think that for me, as an economist, that says it all. There’s some problem.
COWEN: So, you think it’s not true that American women are less happy than they had been? I’m not sure what your stance is.
GOLDIN: My stance is that I’m not happy with the happiness measures.
COWEN: Do you think there’s something else they’re not picking up?
GOLDIN: Yes.
COWEN: That’s an ordinal-choice thing rather than stress in the moment?
GOLDIN: Yes.
COWEN: And that if people are choosing something out of a greater set of opportunities, they probably are happier?
GOLDIN: That’s right. It’s very hard to do that in general. Sometimes we rile up a group and get them to remember the things that they’re less happy about, and sometimes we show them where their lives are safe and secure and wonderful and plentiful, and then they get happier.
I remember when Dick Easterlin first began the happiness literature. I remember very, very well — it was a very long time ago — having dinner with him in Madison, Wisconsin, and talking about it. I was enthralled with trying to understand this happiness literature.
That was across countries, and it seemed interesting, from my Chicago theory point of view, that people recenter their happiness. You can be in a place in which, if you were plunked down there from somewhere else, you’d be miserable, and yet, you’re there, and you recalibrate yourself, just like people recalibrate themselves when they have a bad health event. It takes a while. I’m not certain what to do with the happiness literature.
This business of recalibration made me think of Miriam Yevick, who set out to be a research mathematician but ended up teaching remedial math to adults. She seemed quite happy with that. In my recent 3 Quarks Daily essay about Yevick I remarked that that seemed like Goethe’s Faust, “who sought the secrets of the universe in his youth [...] but ended up reclaiming land from the sea in old age.”
There’s much more in the interview.
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